


Let Me See Your Body [Art]

by ralsbecket



Series: Stuckony Stockings [1]
Category: LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (Cartoon), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Animal Transformation, Digital Art, Engineer Tony Stark, Evil Bucky Barnes, Forbidden Love, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Industrial Revolution, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Song: Body (Jordan Suaste), Steve Rogers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:35:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28931112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ralsbecket/pseuds/ralsbecket
Summary: Stucky Bingo 2020 - E2: Steampunk AU-Mortals fell in love with spirit shifters all on their own, without the aid of magic, but sometimes they fell in love with them right back.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Stuckony Stockings [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2162682
Comments: 8
Kudos: 13
Collections: Stuckony Love Letters, Stucky Bingo 2020





	Let Me See Your Body [Art]

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [Stuckony_server_love_letters](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Stuckony_server_love_letters) collection. 



> “I'm not a toy to play with  
> Not just a sight to see and  
> My mind is worth its weight in gold  
> I'm not a dime a dozen  
> I know I'm worth just more than  
> You will ever know”  
> \- Jordan Suaste, _Body_
> 
> A/N: Inspired by Anon's prompt for _Love, Death & Robots_'s "Good Hunting" episode! The art was originally supposed to be accompanied by a short ficlet but then I word vomited, oops. Hope you enjoy! xD
> 
> (Reblog the post [here!](https://ralsbecket.tumblr.com/post/643133928812773376/let-me-see-your-body-art-by-ralsbecket-mortals))
> 
> Check end-notes for Stucky Bingo info~

The day he met Tony, they were both young and Steve was running for his life. It wasn’t exactly the first time he’d been on the run, as Steve was only ten-years-old when his father Joseph was killed by a human.

Tony’s kind, those that called themselves bounty hunters, were people who spent centuries seeking out spirit shifters like Steve and those of his bloodline, in the name of their villages’ safety. All his life, Steve heard humans calling them abominations, unnatural, scum of the earth. All his life, Steve had only known to fear them.

He was seventeen when he first crossed paths with Tony, after he and his mother Sarah ran for safety in the thick trees of the woods. Tony and his father Howard had hunted them down, ambushed them with something that smelled eerily like piss, which prevented them from transforming back into their true animal forms. Steve remembered getting separated from his mother and finding refuge inside of the trunk of a fallen tree (he was still skinny enough to just fit, back then, and it was the only time when he thanked the gods for his size).

Above all, Steve remembered Tony’s eyes the most, when the brunet eventually found him hiding there. He remembered his heart beating so loud in his ears and feeling it pounding in his chest before their gazes met, and then thinking how Tony’s eyes were _so brown_ that Steve forgot to be scared when he looked at him. Steve remembered the expressions of wonderment and confliction that passed over Tony’s face – young and handsome, but an old soul – before he smiled sadly at him.

Tony pressed a finger to his lips before straightening up and moving away, calling for his father to follow him in the opposite direction. “Dad! It went past the brush; I think we can still –”

“Forget about the pup, Tony. I can track the mother.”

It wasn’t until later in the pitch of night, when Steve finally felt safe enough to leave the security of his hollow tree, that he found his mother’s body discarded in a ditch. Tripped over it, more precisely, but that was the least of his worries.

Her head was gone.

There was only one way that their kind stayed dead, Steve had come to find out as he grew older, and that was to sever the head from the body. And he never knew that he’d hurt so much to see his mother in that position. To see her just…

Steve was heartbroken, scared, frustrated, but more confused than anything – the other boy had spared his life. Spared it for what? So he could live alone as one of the last remaining of his species? There was nothing left for him.

There _was_ nothing left for him. Nothing, until Tony came wandering back into that same forest a few weeks later and left him supplies; food, water, extra clothes for the coming winter. Steve had been rightfully wary in the beginning, but Tony didn’t seem too scared of him. The brunet freely turned his back to him as if he trusted Steve not to attack when he wasn’t looking; something about Tony convinced him not to.

Spirit shifters were often touted around as evil for using “magic,” as if they used it to entrance and seduce humans, and it was anything but true. They only used magic to shift from their animal forms to their beautiful human ones. Mortals fell in love with spirit shifters all on their own, without the aid of magic, but sometimes they fell in love with them right back.

Steve never blamed Tony for his mother’s death, and over five years, they continued an incredibly strong friendship. From his side of things, he could have admitted to slowly falling in love with the human. Tony would come out to the woods, and Steve would find him, and in their little clearing they would revel in the peace and quiet. But then, there was just one day when the forests were nearly gone. There was almost nothing left as the trees were chopped down, only to be replaced by steel tracks and more buildings.

The Americas were beginning to industrialize.

Something else that was taken away by the new world was the slow trickle of magic left in it; Steve noticed it was getting harder and harder to shift between his wolf and human forms every time, one transformation more painful and exerting than the next. More and more nights passed when he couldn’t even shift sometimes, and it scared him.

Steve started to distance himself from Tony. It wasn’t a very difficult task to upkeep after Tony’s father had passed and he was starting to be gone for days at a time. The new world industry had made living in the villages more of survival, and Tony eventually left for the city, the new big island of Manhattan, and left Steve behind too.

The industrial revolution that spread across their country had slowly but surely run the magic dry. After waking up stuck permanently in his human form, unable to hunt and provide for himself, Steve made the ultimate decision to make his way to the concrete jungle of Manhattan. He was too skinny to be doing laborious work, and nobody was very keen on whatever artwork he was offering, either.

When one man looked him up and down with a glint of hunger in his eyes, Steve felt disgusted with himself for even considering giving a quick blow in the back alley. But by then he’d gone days without any food, so it wasn’t like he had any choice in the matter. It was crude and gross and unpracticed, and his jaw ached for far too long after, but the man had tucked a crisp bill under the collar of Steve’s shirt anyway when they were finished.

He was beautiful when you looked at him, more lean muscle and skinny arms than anything, but he was good with his hands, his mouth, and his dick. He had those eyes of blue that everyone always told him were enchanting, and he learned to use them to his advantage. Steve became the thing that the bounty hunters had once accused his kind of being – a spirit that bewitched and seduced men and women for his own gain. Eventually, he learned to push away the self-loathing that he felt in favor of feeling food in his stomach; and for a while, it was the only way he lived.

For a place so big, the fates sure made Manhattan seem small in retrospect. Steve had been idling on a street corner, trying to flag down his next target customer, when he spotted a handsome man approaching up the block.

“Looking for a good time, sweetness?” he crooned, batting his eyelashes in the guy’s direction like he’d long perfected.

“No, thanks, I’m kind of in a…” The man stopped short, turning his head fully to stare at Steve, who held his gaze before realizing that _he knew him_. Tony looked different; his hair was longer, his face was marked with a moustache and goatee, and his clothes were no longer the old garb the bounty hunter had adorned years ago.

But his eyes. His eyes were the same.

Tony had been kind enough to buy him a meal, at least, before walking with Steve around his neighborhood. They exchanged stories of their time in Manhattan, as if no time had passed between them: Tony had learned to work with technology, training and becoming incredibly skilled with machinery and automata. He had made a name for himself, whereas Steve had only run his name into the dirt.

There was no doubt that he felt ashamed for where his circumstances had landed him, but Tony… Tony, bless his heart, reminded him just how pure he was regardless.

They fell into bed together that night. There had been many quick fucks in back alleys, in the seats of automobiles, in rented rooms, but laying with Tony was the essence of making love. Steve loved Tony’s hands, strong and calloused, leaving deep bruises on his arms, his hips, that would fade days later. Steve loved Tony’s mouth, certain and ravenous, biting down the column of his neck and claiming the sounds that would escape his lips.

Tony’s mouth and hands on his skin was like making _magic,_ something he had been intimately familiar with. In Tony’s arms, he felt _safe_. In Tony’s arms, he felt _whole_. Loved. It was also why Steve was sure that he couldn’t keep him; he couldn’t stand the thought of dragging Tony down for his own selfish reasons. And so he left.

Steve only regretted his decision a few days later when he picked up a young, attractive man who called himself Buchanan. He was tall, handsome, well-dressed, and smelled of money. There was a disarming kind of charm to the man, almost the same that he felt with Tony. Steve wasn’t sure what convinced him to agree, but he went home with him. Red wine and wandering hands were the last things he remembered before the world slipped from his grasp.

When Steve regained consciousness, he realized all four of his limbs had been strapped down to a surgical table. A bright, blinding light was swinging over him, mocking him. There were people in masks surrounding him, wearing magnifying spectacles and holding sharp scalpels.

And then Buchanan was whispering in his ear – James Buchanan Barnes, he later found out, the son of Manhattan’s mayor. The man’s words sounded sweet like honey coming from his mouth and were anything but.

“Oh, sweetheart. Been watching you a while.” Buchanan licked a wet stripe from Steve’s chin to his ear, and it was all Steve could do to jerk away from him. “I’ve heard how much you love to _fuck_ like a machine,” he crooned, smirking down at him with an evil look in his eyes. “I’d love to fuck one even more.”

Steve barely had time to let the words draw out his feeling of horror before a saw was cutting into his leg, the pain shooting through him like lightning. He screamed. He cried. He begged. He didn’t remember blacking out from the shock.

For a few months, Steve was resigned to being nothing but Buchanan’s play-thing. A sex toy, all of his own design. Steve’s new mechanical body… taller. Bulkier. Stronger. It felt weird getting used to new limbs, like a baby learning to walk for the first time, but he couldn’t dwell much on it when the mayor’s son was constantly between his legs, caging him from behind, and just taking whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

Steve killed him, one day. He didn’t mean to, at first, not that he didn’t have it coming for him. Buchanan had been saying things around him, about sharing his favorite toy with the world, and he’d just… He saw red. Steve remembered the fear in the man’s eyes when he grabbed him by the throat, choking out a strained, “I _made_ you.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” he replied calmly despite the anger in his face. Steve remembered the feeling of exhilaration when the light was snuffed from the man’s eyes.

Steve only knew of one person he could turn to, one single person he could trust, and that was how he found himself seeking out the engineer. He’d snuck through the back alleys of a bustling Manhattan, catching glimpses of humans with body modifications just like him, and it made him feel othered.

The streets began looking familiar, eventually. Seeing Tony outside of his workshop, lighting up a pipe to smoke, had sent fear coursing through Steve’s inorganic limbs almost like years ago, when he’d been chased the first time. Except, this time, he wasn’t afraid of Tony killing him; he was afraid of Tony being disgusted by him.

When Steve approached and called for Tony’s name, the man had turned around with a smile on his face and his eyes leveled with Steve’s chest. He paused, brows furrowing together as his eyes traveled up to Steve’s face. Instead of disappointment or disgust like Steve had prepared to see, he saw sympathy and anger and pain flash across Tony’s features. It looked so foreign on his face that Steve wanted to kiss it away, and in his mind he wondered why he’d walked away in the first place.

Steve told him about what happened, how he’d been turned into something he never wanted to be. He also told Tony about his goal, about wanting to hunt again. Instead of food for life, because he didn’t need it to survive anymore, he wanted to hunt down the people like Buchanan who thought they could get away with anything. He was strong enough now not only to exact revenge on them, but in a way, he was able to finally avenge his mother, too.

And because Tony loved him, unreservedly and unconditionally, he’d set to helping him fulfill his dream. Using his skills as an engineer, Tony painstakingly designed and created a new body for Steve. Little by little, Tony slowly replaced Steve’s mechanical body with a flexible chrome one, a body he could once more transform in.

It brought Steve a vague feeling of déjà vu. Tony had always been _it_ for him, he realized too late. From bringing him supplies in the woods, to showing him how love could really be. Tony’s hands were sure, steady as he worked with the moving parts and mechanisms; being in his arms gave Steve a solid sense of _magic_ in his world again.

On the final day of tinkering with Steve’s limbs and torso, Tony couldn’t help but admire him. Not Steve’s body, or his looks, but his heart. The same one that he’d fallen in love with when they were young and naïve and hopeful; the same one that burned strong when Steve consumed the bowl of coal and activated the machinery.

It was… painful. Steve felt every bit of the transformation like it was his old body, and it was liberating. When he’d shifted into a new wolf form, he’d stolen one last look at Tony before darting out of the workshop through the window. He found his footing seamlessly, moving along the ledges and rooftops of the city, already on the hunt for new blood.

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Let Me See Your Body  
> Creator: ralsbecket  
> Card number: #077  
> Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28931112  
> Square filled: E2 - Steampunk AU  
> Rating: M  
> Archive warnings: Slightly non-con  
> Major tags: Industrial revolution, non-consensual body modification, animal transformation, forbidden love  
> Summary: Mortals fell in love with spirit shifters all on their own, without the aid of magic, but sometimes they fell in love with them right back.  
> Word count: 2410
> 
> A/N: Most references from [this steampunk aeronaut showcase](https://www.noupe.com/inspiration/showcases/24hrs-with-a-steampunk-aeronaut-narrative-showcase.html) and _Alita: Battle Angel_.
> 
> [Check out my linktree for tumblr, discord, and other socials!](https://linktr.ee/ralsbecket)


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